Our latest sample pack on BPM Create, Soulwave – Soul Trap, is perfect for creating smooth, emotional hip hop and R&B tracks with a trap edge, inspired by Rod Wave, a pioneer of the soul trap sound. You’ll find a mix of emotive melodies, rich keys, melancholic guitars, and atmospheric synths paired with hard-hitting drums and 808s.

Read on for three helpful tips for achieving the soul trap sound.

Sound Pack Spotlight: Production Tips and Tricks

For Beginners:

Writing melody stack layers.

Simplify your music-writing process by editing multiple MIDI clips at once. Start with a chord progression that acts as a guide for how you will write the other layers.

In this example, we can see that all of the notes present within the piano layer (purple MIDI) are also present on the bass layer (green MIDI) and lead layer (yellow MIDI). The green MIDI is the bass layer and follows the root note of the piano progression, while the yellow MIDI lead layer plays an arpeggiated pattern of notes taken from the chord progression.

Explore uplifting pianos 🎹

Next level: Intermediate

Hard-hitting drums.

Use an SSL-style bus compressor with slow attack (10ms or higher) and fast release (0.1s) to make your drums punch harder through the mix. A slow attack allows transients to pass through the compressor, preserving the snappiness of your drums, while the fast release setting allows the drum hits to recover from the compression effect faster. After finding the sweet spot of threshold/gain reduction, add some makeup gain until your drums cut through the mix.

Get trap drum & synth samples 🥁

For Advanced

Resampled reverse reverbs.

Resample a one-shot synth sound with a large amount of reverb and delay. Bounce the audio to another channel and reverse it into your piano chords. This technique creates an emotional vibe and helps you transition smoothly into a piano chord progression or melody.

Experiment with trap melodies 🎶